Jillyanna in the News

Woodfired Cooking with Jill Strauss

From episode 228

Jill was recently featured on Life Simplified Radio, speaking about woodfired cooking and going back to the basics.

Summertime and the Living is Easy on Life Simplified Radio and today we explore cooking outside with culinary expert Jill Strauss from Jillyanna’s Woodfired Cooking School. Jill shares her passion for cooking, her enthusiasm for cooking outside, and samples of a few of her recipes. I wish you were here to have a taste. Whether you have a small hibachi or an elaborate outside kitchen you will hear more than enough ideas to get your creative cooking juices flowing. Hey…! Light a fire under your next meal. Be Safe! Buon appetito!

Find Jillyanna’s in this month’s (January/February) Yankee Magazine! We are featured in the the Guide to Simple Living section underneath Open Hearth Cooking.

Read an excerpt below and be sure to pick up the issue on newsstands!

I knew I wanted to do something surrounded by fire and gardens, says Jill Strauss, a former schoolteacher and Johnson & Wales culinary grad.

“It engages all the senses.” Classes, which tend to run three to four hours, are held May through December in Strauss’s kitchen and in the lush gardens where her wood-fired oven stands. Strauss traveled to Italy to study Neapolitan pizza making, and her classes cover a large range of subjects, from pizza to pasta to pie making.

Thrusting caramelized onion and chorizo-topped pizzas into a blazing wood-fired oven and pulling out spectacular gourmet discs every 90 seconds is part of the show.

“Neapolitan pizza requires great heat. Wood is the perfect method,” said Strauss, a restaurant veteran who spent weeks in Naples, Italy, learning to make these thin-crust-in-the-center but puffy-on the-edges pies invented centuries ago in the old country. An intensive class with a fourth-generation pizzaiolo who was “yelling at me in Italian for two weeks” was her baptism by fire.

As people across the country turn to slow cooking, ancient methods like wood-fired cooking have become increasingly more attractive. “There is a longing that people have to slow down,” said Strauss.

“I think we have a very busy society. Everyone is unbelievably stressed and hurried. It’s not just a cooking school but an opportunity to meet new people who share your passions.”

Scores of people sign up for Strauss’ classes and workshops, taught in her Kennebunkport backyard anchored by a stunning mortar oven surrounded in field stone and granite. Their motivation is multi-pronged. “It’s an experience to cook with wood. You are doing something that’s very old fashioned and gratifying,” said Strauss. “Being able to tame that fire and produce something so delicious with live fire … it’s almost like a sport.” […]